PLENTIFUL PLEASING PARKLETS

Brian Deegan, Principal Design Engineer

Vienna is doing something obviously beneficial, on a mass scale, that we in the UK are struggling to bring into standard practice. Throughout the summer, at least (and possibly throughout the year), chunks of on-street parking on practically every other street in the centre are given over to parklets. While many cities now have parklets here and there, to see them present en masse across an entire city centre was quite something to behold. We didn’t have to hunt them down like an obscure piece of tactical urbanism: they were everywhere. Many were under private ownership and maintained by the various cafes, restaurants and businesses they were outside – and why wouldn’t they be? In a walkable and liveable city, tying up at least 10 square metres for the exclusive use of a car seems stupid when it could seat, say, a hundred paying customers a day.

It was so refreshing to see footways kept clear of the tables and chairs that can create clutter as life spreads onto the sunny streets. Each parklet was unique and brought character to streets that would otherwise have been fronted by a sterile row of cars. In a few instances, rows of echelon parking enabled wider-than-usual parklets that responded by having a parallelogram shape.
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The Austrians still seem to love their cars, but rationally seem also to have decided that there’s no need to retain all the available street space in the city centre to store them. I just helped Stockport install a joint parklet and pocket park in their town centre and this has given people a reason to visit that area – to dwell and play – and I hope it will be a light-bulb moment for Greater Manchester as a whole. Many of the arguments against parklets in the UK centre around the misconception that they will attract antisocial behaviour, but if we don’t create spaces where people can be civilised then how can we expect civilisation to prosper? I hope other towns and cities in the UK start to see the benefits from the few examples we have – and from those that cities like Vienna have – because this temporary, yet elegant, solution offers a small glimpse of what a city society can look like if it reduces its dependence on, and the dominance of, cars.